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Greenville to gain 50 new manufacturing jobs

A Canadian automotive industry supplier will create more than 50 news jobs at a former military tank components manufacturing plant in Greenville, company officials announced Thursday.

Ontario-based PFI Group Inc. will expand its operations into the former Cadillac Gage Textron Inc. building at 5963 Jaysville-St. Johns Road in Greenville.

The expansion will create more than 50 new manufacturing jobs, said Albert Wiebe, PFI’s managing partner.

PFI Group manufactures metal racking for automotive parts and has serviced clients that include Toyota, Honda, BMW, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. The local plant, PFI USA, will build automotive part racks for shipping car parts from suppliers to the assembly line, officials said.

PFI expects to start some local production by the end of February, with the entire 87,000-square-foot facility in use by the end of the year, officials said.

PFI Group is headquartered in Aylmer, Ontario, a small town midway between Detroit and Toronto.

“This new plant in Greenville allows us to expand so we can better serve our customers by having a second plant in the Midwest, where many of them are located,” Wiebe said in a statement.

Greenville was selected in part because of its proximity to Cincinnati and East Liberty, Ohio; Lexington and Louisville, Ky.; and Evansville, Ind., where most of PFI Group’s customers are located.

The former Cadillac Gage building produced tank parts for the Lima Army Tank Plant, said Tim Echemann of Industrial Property Brokers, the Sidney real estate firm that brokered the deal.

Cadillac Gage employed about 150 people before it closed in 2001, Echemann said. In recent years the facility has been used for warehousing and plastics recycling, he said.

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